Coven Keepers (Dark Fae Hollows Book 10)

by Thea Atkinson

  I nearly gasped as the magnitude of the realization struck me. “Your light.”

  He pursed his lips and went for the sink to run water over his hands. The faucet squeaked out its protest at being used for such a horrible thing as rinsing away blood. The water ran black, and I had the nearly irresistible urge to light the sink and his hands with my magic. I needed to see the blood. Wanted to see it. Something about the way his hands moved beneath the stream of water made my knees go weak. He had killed. For me.

  “Ari,” I said. “Let me see your lumen.”

  “You still want in?” he said affably over his shoulder. “With four down, we can’t be too picky about the help we take.”

  “Let me see it.”

  He turned, wiping his hands on his jeans, and faced me.

  “No.”

  I stormed him before I could consider what I was doing. My hands were on his shirt and burrowing beneath the hem even as he pushed backward against the sink.

  The shock of hot skin on my fingers, of a reflexive ripple of hard muscle undulating beneath my palm, halted my search as quickly as it began. I heard my own sharp intake of breath and his responsive chuckle, thick as the shadows, as his foot hitched itself around my ankle, trapping me.

  My gaze snapped to his, and I had the feeling my horror showed as clearly as if my face was lit. He caught my eye and held it for an agonizing moment before he spoke.

  “Now, little one?” he murmured. “With the boy right there?”

  Yanking my hands from beneath the hem, I clutched them to my chest. I could barely believe what I’d just done. If not for the way his hands snaked around my waist and pulled me close, I would have bolted. My heart stuttered as it tried to find a natural rhythm. A fragrance I recognized from the beach of seaweed, old smoke, and just a hint of sage wash wrapped itself around me like a fine woolen blanket. His smell, I realized. I couldn’t speak because my throat was so tight. When he placed his lips against my temple, I thought my knees would give out.

  “You think my tastes run like Gus’s there?” he said into my hairline, his fingers worming their way onto the bare skin of my midriff. His fingers held as much heat as his chest, and I could have sworn they lit fire to my veins everywhere they touched. Calloused and dry, they prickled against each raise of gooseflesh they discovered on my skin.

  “You think I’d take an unwilling?” he murmured. “You think I fancy the violence of it?”

  “No,” I rasped out, terrified, but quite sure by then that it was from fear he’d let me go. Panic that he’d sense the hammering of my heart. Clutched there, so close to his body, feeling a hardness against my hips that made my ears grow hot, I understood, finally, what all these peculiar emotions were trying to tell me. I wanted to be there, next to him. The realization horrified me.

  While his hands roamed the smooth of my back, he eased away, searching my face with those scrutinizing eyes of his. They were blue. Like my own. Like the boy’s. I couldn’t hold that gaze. Not while his hands were on my skin, not while he could read in my eyes how much I liked the warmth of them and the way they made my pulse race.

  “No,” he said thoughtfully. “No, you don’t want that, do you?”

  My eyes flicked to his again. Was he mocking me? I couldn’t read what was in those blue depths, but I imagined the crinkles at the corners meant he was trying not to laugh at the preposterous notion of wanting me. Imagine a scrawny redheaded witch with no mother, no father, no loved one at all, thinking she could be interesting to a man like him. My chest heaved with sudden anger. I wrenched away from him, stumbling as my boots bit into one of the dead brigand’s hands.

  “Arrogant bastard,” I said. I yanked my shirt down and swallowed hard to get rid of the way my voice cracked. “You think you’re better than me?”

  I stormed toward Uriel. He shrank back into the shadows as I approached, so I ended up spinning about and pacing the room instead. “You have no idea what I am. No idea what I can do to you.”

  I kicked at the leg of one of my assailants, expecting to feel better. When I didn’t, I spun furiously around to search out Ari again. He hadn’t moved one inch.

  “Fuck you,” I said. I was getting pretty good at the word, and it seemed to fit right then. “Fuck.” I said again for good measure.

  He cocked his head at me as though he were working something out. It had the same effect as if he’d thrown a barrel of flaming logs at me. Every muscle in my body went rigid as I choked on a dozen spiteful curses and ended up making nothing but strangled half cries and grunts.

  “Virgin,” he said finally, a slow smile spreading across his face. “That’s it.” The hands that had so heated my skin just seconds earlier rammed themselves into his pockets. “That or Dark Fae. I’m banking on virgin.”

  “I’m not Fae,” I ground out.

  His brow arched. “Oh, I know, little one,” he said.

  “It’s Everly.”

  Ari sighed. “Come on, boy. We have a deal to be making before the grim ones get back.” He waggled his fingers with an outstretched arm toward the boy. The boy hung back, seeming to understand something odd was happening.

  “You’re not taking him,” I said. I clenched my fists by my sides, ready to blast him no matter how many grim ones I trolled in with my magic.

  He turned leisurely toward me, and I noticed Uriel had already slipped his small hand into Ari’s. “I thought you wanted in,” he said with such a heart-stopping grin that I wanted instantly to throw a jolt of magic his way and burn the smile from his face.

  “I do.” My fingers squeezed into my palms, working to keep the anger at bay. “But I don’t trust you. You have to let me hold him.”

  “This little boy is worth a pretty light price to the right buyer,” he said. “I wouldn’t let Gus keep him; what makes you think I’ll let you hold him?”

  It wasn’t so much the words as the tone that made his question sound like a threat.

  I squared my shoulders. Defensive.

  “Because I won’t hurt him.”

  He blew air through his teeth. “You saying you care about him, then? You who didn’t even know him until you met his mother. Just this night.”

  He hoisted the boy onto his hip and then up to his shoulders where Uriel’s feet dangled over his chest.

  “I don’t think so.” He tilted his chin toward the door of the kitchen where the darkness beyond was lit by a weak lumen or two. “I trust the rest of those brigands out there more than I trust you.”

  “And what makes you think I can trust you? You might just be planning to keep him and use his light until it’s gone.”

  He shook his head as though he thought I was a fool. “You take me for stupid?” he said. “There’s two things that drain light faster than anything else in this hollow. Murder and stealing light from a child. If the Fae want to drain him for their own ends, let them deal with the consequences. I’ll keep to earning my light.”

  “Stealing it, you mean,” I said, a certain bitterness fueling my tongue before I could stop it. “And killing for it.”

  He set his lips in a tight line, and I knew I’d gone too far. It was a look I knew well because I always seemed to go too far. With the coven, with the child witch who ran out into the night because I scared her. With Freya, even, as I pushed her to make the coven accept me as I was. Biting down on my bottom lip, I stepped closer until I was a breath away. I could feel the air wafting at me each time Uriel swung his foot and thumped Ari’s chest.

  I braced myself. “Let me see your lumen.”

  His lips twitched. “No one wants full light, little one. Too hard on the eyes.”

  “Let me see it.”

  His hands gripped the boy’s ankles, forcing them to still. “You don’t want that, Everly.”

  My chest flooded with warmth at the use of my name. “You don’t know what I want.”

  “I know you want this boy,” he said. “And I know you won’t get him.” He got a hard look to his face, and he
pointed in the direction of the outer shelter. “No one will take him from me until I get what I want for him.”

  I reached out and gripped his forearm, finding a trigger point that should send a man to his knees. He winced but didn’t complain. Instead, he laughed, much as Gus had, and I felt my teeth grind together.

  “Show me your light,” I said.

  “Look at you,” he said. “You’re no better than the rest of them, thinking light is the answer. Fools, the lot of you. Light will corrupt the world even more. Not save it.”

  I was reaching for his shirt, fully planning to tear the buttons and see the lumen I knew was beneath. He saw it coming, because he sort of half-grinned, daring me.

  A yellow light leaking through the door and a short squeal stopped me before I could tear the buttons free. The girl volunteer from before, gripped by her elbow by one of the brigands from the shelter.

  “Brad’s back,” he said and nipped the girl’s earlobe, eliciting another squeal from her. I rolled my eyes.

  “Time to go, little one,” Ari said too cheerily. “If Brad’s back, he must have taken the right amount of lumen to juice up the bus after all.”

  Recalling the girl Brad had pulled out into the night along with him, I felt a pang of regret that I hadn’t done anything to help her. I cast a sidelong glance at the girl whose lumen was now cutting through the shadows of the kitchen.

  “They’re going to kill you,” I said blandly. “They’re going to use your light for something ludicrous and then you will die.”

  She looked me square in the eyes. For a moment, I felt like I was standing somewhere else and not in a filthy scullery kitchen. There was a look of peace and hope on her face that surprised me.

  “That’s what he promised,” she said, looking at her companion. “Easy death, right? Not darkness. You said I wouldn’t go dark.”

  The brigand stole a look at Ari as though he was looking for permission. The act made my neck go clammy, because until that moment, I hadn’t truly thought about how much power these brigands had over the rest of these poor souls’ lives.

  Ari put a possessive hand on Uriel’s leg and smoothed his expression into a mask of emotionless features. I remembered the way he struck out at Gus when he’d threatened me, the way he’d kept the boy from seeing his dead mother. The stoic, emotionless brigand thing was an act, all of it. I was as sure of that as I was of my own heartbeat.

  “Don’t worry, little one,” he said to the girl. “We’ll make sure it’s quick.”

  The way he said it, with just a note of comfort, I understood those words were meant for me as much as they were for her. Careful, they said. But for a whim, he could take my light and my life and no one would care.

  The blare of a horn sounded from the front of the shelter, smothering the muttered dare I sent his way.

  “Brad,” Ari said, giving me a quizzical look. I guessed he’d heard my threat after all. “Time to make a move.”

  Indeed. It was well past time.

  I couldn’t get on that bus, and neither could I let Uriel. I sidled my way across the shelter, hard on Ari’s heels, waiting for the moment we found the air outside and I could get my own show on the road. I was getting more used to the dimness, and didn’t even need a lumen casting light in front of me to see where I was going. Whatever residual night vision I carried with me from Avalon was evolving finally to the human realm’s darkness. With any luck, I could grab the boy and disappear without having to blind them with a blast of magic.

  I lost sight of him and Uriel as we pushed through the shelter doors and gathered around on the sidewalk. The fresh air felt magnificent after the suffocating stink of the shelter. I tried to see where he’d gone. When I saw him standing at the side of the bus, with the boy standing next to him, I realized he was relieving himself and was obviously teaching the boy to do the same. I couldn’t help smiling and then my throat went tight as I realized whatever small bit of kindness the boy was getting from the brigand now, it would all change when he was delivered to the coven keeper. It made me doubly determined to nab the boy before we got that far.

  The bus was everything I’d imagined it to be. Rusted and stinking of feces and urine so strongly I could smell it from where I stood next to the shelter’s door. It squatted outside, sputtering and looking generally disgusting, with Brad holding the door to his transport open like some macabre conductor for the dead and dying.

  “Get on in,” he shouted toward the few of us who huddled around.

  None of the people who passed by outside the shelter would look our way, and they gave Brad and his bus a wide berth. No doubt they recognized the gang of thugs and their intent and didn’t want to be captured in the net by accident.

  But there was something else about the scene that bothered me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I thought it might be the way some of those city folk shuffled along without so much as casting a glance our way. They looked…wrong. It was only when a crowd of younger women started for the bus and Brad turned to usher them in that I noticed the shadow climbing over the top of the vehicle and reaching for Brad’s head.

  I had time to notice long arms dangling down for him before Ari yelped. The next instant, the fingers attached to those arms dug into Brad’s eye sockets, gripping as though his brow was a handle to yank on, and then up he went, sailing along the bus and onto the roof.

  One horrible scream rent the new darkness as his lumen blazed upward for a sickening instant. Then it went black and the distinct sound of smacking carried over the asphalt toward me. I felt sick listening to it, frozen by the sound as surely as if it had tied me to the door.

  Seconds later, Brad dropped back to the ground in front of the bus, shriveled and grey, with nothing in his sockets except shadows even blacker than the darkness of his newly drained flesh.

  “Sweet Miriam,” I said. “Did they just eat his eyeballs?”

  Chapter 12

  The sidewalk erupted in grim ones. They crawled over the bus, slithered beneath it, and several of them leapt over the hood and sailed at us as though they had wings. From left and right they came, and the darkness beyond them seethed with the sound of echo location until I could no longer hear the thrashing of my own heartbeat in my ears. All I could think about was Brad’s eyes turning to mush in the mouth of one of those grim creatures. I didn’t think of Uriel or the coven. I didn’t think of anything except spinning on my heels and tearing for the door of the shelter.

  The futility of running became abundantly clear when I felt someone grab me from behind to use me to slingshot themselves for the door faster. Then another grip wrapped around my ankle, and I realized it was someone who’d fallen and was being trampled beneath panic-stricken feet. Before I could even reach the door, it had already been locked by those homeless who hadn’t yet left the shelter. Some of the few closest to the entryway had managed to worm their way back through when the grim ones came at us. Now each one of them inside pressed against the entry, barricading us from getting back in.

  I hadn’t signed on for this. No one told me this mission would be this ghastly. I was just supposed to come to the human realm, find a poor child, and return home. In my naiveté, I had assumed the greatest danger was the kraken. That once I had found my way past that deadly peril, I could take on anything else because anything else would be either human or Fae. Not these horrible creatures that had once been human, reminding me that complete infection by the darkness would eventually turn us all into the same repulsive things. My legs trembled as I stood there, completely paralyzed and sick at myself for being unable to move.

  With so many lumens extinguished and inert, the darkness had grown oppressive and nearly absolute. Whatever bit of night vision I thought I had gained was now lost, and I felt more alone than I’d ever felt. I thought I might be hyperventilating. There was a relatively thin boundary of bodies between me and the horde of grim ones even now tearing through homeless and brigand alike. At any moment, I might be clutched
in some revolting grip. My eyes would be pulled from their sockets before I could even register someone was coming after me. I heard every shriek and disgusting noise that indicated one more human being had just lost his eyesight.

  Uriel was out there with Ari somewhere. I clutched at my stomach as I imagined the poor boy torn from the brigand. Every minute sound of the grims pulling down derelict after derelict magnified itself in those seconds. I swung this way and that, frantic to find the boy. He was why I had come, and I couldn’t get this far and give up now. All I had to do was move. Just move.

  I saw the grim one reach for me the way one saw a shadow lengthening in the dark. I acted, thankfully, but it was out of instinct and not rational thought. The prickle of magic ran up my hands in a single heartbeat, and I blasted the thing that came at me with one full-sized jolt that made me stumble and catch my balance by staggering and grasping for the wall of the building. I was left gasping in ragged breaths in the wake of its release. The next instant, I felt another grip on my wrist, pulling me sideways. A gruff voice sounded right next to. It said my name. I was sure of it. I swung my gaze, dumbfounded, trying to make out the source of the voice.

  Ari’s face shone out at me through the darkness, lit by Uriel’s lumen with such clarity it was terrifying. His man bun had come loose, his hair falling around his ears and into his eyes. The soft waves looked almost feminine. For a second, I doubted it was him.

  “Come on, Everly,” Ari growled. “Get moving.”

  My legs were still frozen. I looked from the grim one still sizzling with purple flickers lighting up its bulbous veins to Ari’s face. There was something eerie about the way it was lit now with the residual glow of my magic, and I understood it was because he’d smothered Uriel’s lumen beneath his jacket.

  “Fuck, Everly,” he said. “Move.”

  He’d seen me blast the grim one. I knew it, yet here he was, pulling me toward the bus, pushing me once I found a way to force my legs to stagger along with him. Three brigands were hard on our heels, and we pushed into the vehicle as though it could fit six at a time. I fell on the floor as feet shuffled past me.